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How would you like to call a missile base home? America built 107 missile bases around the country during the arms race in the 1960s, including the Atlas F Missile Silo located about 130 miles north of Albany. It was decommissioned after only four years and has sat dormant and neglected for decades, eventually selling for $160,000 in 1997 and again for $575,000 in 2015. Bear in mind that the “super hardened” facility, built for the equivalent of $100 million in today’s dollars, was designed to withstand almost any bomb imaginable.
First aid: Many of the first aid kits you’ll find in Amazon searches aren’t good enough for survival scenarios (regardless of what their marketing says) because they’re meant for daily use or OSHA work compliance. Invest in a high-quality kit that includes supplies for more serious injuries like broken bones or deep, bleeding wounds. Frankly, we’ve never found an off-the-shelf kit we’re 100% happy with, but a great starter option is this Adventure Medical Fundamentals Kit.
If it’s at all below the level of the water table, it will flood, concrete, steel, or other materials be damned. Sure, there is some top-notch engineering you can do to keep the water out, but it’s expensive. One solution is to put the bunker at ground level and then pile dirt on top of it, but you need very large amount of dirt to protect it from impact.
the seeds from gmo plants are useless, gmo plants are also now linked to organ failure… gmo is not evolution, I think you may be thinking of hybrids which are entirely different. But even hybrid seeds will not produce the same crop the next year as the seeds gathered from hybrid plants revert back to one of the parent plants which may be fine but I wouldnt take the chance in a time when you count on it for survival… So from a sustainability point of view gmo plants are useless, not to mention that many heirlooms are also disease and pest resistant, just naturally. There are also natural ways to control disease and pests for plants. If survival is key then sustainability is also key.
Barbara – I know what you mean. It is easy to become both overwhelmed and disorganized at the same time. The nice thing about the list of 20 items is that you can purchase them all at once or one item a week. Then you can set them aside and at least for the short term, consider your food shopping done and move on to the gear or the next major task on your preparedness to-do list.

Ned in the comments reminded me that a bike really should be on this list. Of course, I don’t really need to say, but a good mountain bike is incredibly useful in a SHTF situation where fuel is hard to get. Ned mentioned that it’d be a good idea to couple the bike with a carrying rack on the front or back, and if you can, an electric generator. I think that’s a pretty damn great idea; only problem is I haven’t managed to find any electric generators for bikes that actually have good reviews. If you know of one, please recommend one down in the comments section.

20. Mini LED Flashlight and Extra Batteries. Okay, this is a cheater item. It is not food but it is all important and so it will not hurt to stash a miniature flashlight or two along with the edibles in your food storage pantry. My top pick of the moment is the Blocklite. This thing just goes and goes and goes plus, it does not take up any storage space.

Didn’t see this on the list and it could be an entire new thread. But first have a olan of what you will do. Think of all scenarios. What to do if you are not at home with the family. Where do you meet? Do you have a bug out site that everyone who needs to know has a map to it and knows when to bug out. Make sure you have what you need from this llist at the bug out site already. Do not try to haul what you need once you get there. You wil never make… Read more »

That is a great idea Scott! When I started writing this article it was my intent to get people thinking about how to cook in an emergency or SHTF situation. While a lot of the readers of Backdoor Survival are experienced at cooking, there are also a lot of folks out there that are just learning how to cook. I am 34 and I have to say that a lot of people my age don’t cook but they are learning. I always have cooked. Mom headed out the door when I was 4 so it was me and my Dad who cooked for me a lot of the time but I had to do some too. Donating food is a great thing to do if you are not able to use what you have stockpiled and it is set to expire. Thanks for a great suggestion as we enter the holiday season!

Some lights are crank powered like our emergency radio above and having at least one of those is not a bad idea. Alternate light sources are candles, which are cheap but present a fire hazard, or chemlights, which are completely safe and heatless, but also have utility for marking, safety and signaling. Redundancy is a good idea, but emphasize flashlights and headlamps. Both require…
My military experience was let’s just say in the last century and MREs have gone through some pretty decent changes and updates since the time I was chowing down. For those who don’t know what an MRE is, the Acronym stands for Meal Ready to Eat and this is what is given to our soldiers when they aren’t near a mess hall. When I was in the field we would usually get an MRE for lunch. Breakfast and dinners would be a hot meal, or it started out as hot when we crowded around the mess tent or the insulated containers they drove out to us on the back of a jeep. By the time you got somewhere to eat your meal it was usually cold. We would only go to the field in the winter time naturally.
I’ve just explained why EMP wouldn’t be as destructive as a full-scale nuclear war, but it would still be devastating – and it’s a lot more likely than a Cold War-style missile exchange. There are two reasons for that. Firstly, it’s a lot more survivable for the aggressor; our government might hesitate to launch a retaliatory strike on a country, killing millions of its people, because its leaders exploded a nuclear warhead in space. Secondly there are more countries who are capable of doing it right now or could be there in a matter of months.

The next thing that you should be aware of is how to use the food that you have prepped and stored. Get familiar with stored-food preparation and the best way to do this is to use it. Get a couple of food-storage cookbooks, or create your own with a little online research. This way you and your family can become familiar with how to use and eat these types of foods.

Magazines are a weak point in any gun that uses them. They can get lost or damaged, and springs eventually weaken. This is one advantage of pump shotguns and bolt action rifles – they’re not as dependent on magazines as semiautos. Get as many good quality magazines as you can for any guns that need them, and take good care of them. Then get some weapon spares. Firing pins, springs and backup sights are all good things to have. A chipped firing pin will turn any weapon into junk – you need to have the parts, tools and skills to replace it.
2. 20 pounds of Pinto Beans. Like rice, beans are the backbone to every food storage plan. You may substitute white, kidney or other types of dried beans but honestly, pintos are one of the least expensive dried beans and in my opinion, one of the tastiest. Need help cooking beans? when you are done here be sure to read Survival Woman Learns to Cook Dried Beans and you should too and Respect for the Lowly Pinto Bean.

Something big is going on, the island has more aircraft than anytime in the last 9 years. They have blocked off some access roads and are now parking aircraft on the National Road. Barriers have been set up around the aircraft areas. Temporary barracks and hangers are popping up everywhere. A tent city full of AF and Navy maintenance personal has also been set up.

I would contend that most (if not all) “long shelf life” dehydrated/freeze dried food products fail to deliver the calorie and protein count that is required to survive. It is far more likely that you would have to double the quantity and cost to actually achieve any specified duration. If you don’t believe me, just examine the details in their advertising.
I’ve written in a previous article about beans as survival food. No matter how you look at it, the bottom line is that beans are a superfood. They are high in protein and fiber and other nutrients that can help keep you healthy during an extended crisis. They are excellent foods to feed more than one person since one cup of dry beans makes 2-3 cups of cooked beans (depending on the variety). Once you get to the store, make sure you pick three large bags of beans. To diversify your meals feel free to choose your favorite. One thing to mention is that beans are also proper survival seeds. In case you need to start a garden, you already have some of the seeds waiting for you.
I know that in my own case and also with the majority of the readers on Backdoor Survival, hunkering down and bugging in will always be preferred to taking off into the unknown with our stuff. For many, the choice to bug in has to do with family, health concerns or financial considerations. That, plus the availability of stored supplies makes bugging in – or staying at home – the choice when a disaster strikes.
In all the years I’ve worked with preparedness one of the biggest problems I’ve seen is people storing food and not knowing what to do with it. It’s vital that you and your family become familiar with the things you are storing. You need to know how to prepare these foods. This is not something you want to learn under stress. Your family needs to be used to eating these foods. A stressful period is not a good time to totally change your diet. Get a food storage cookbook and learn to use these foods!
Disturbing news from the Southern Carribean. The World Bank just “ruled” against Venezuela in favor of oil giant ConocoPhillips, saying they could “seize” their government owned oil assets. All this while Russian nuclear bombers and naval vessels have been sighted in the area. Venezuela, already on the verge of collapse, may be the next flash point in the world. Lawsuit Article Link
Of course, one of the most rewarding things about learning to make something with your own hands is that you can pass that know-how to other people. As students put the finishing touches on their shelving units and sawhorses, I get to chatting with Kathleen Lokey, a flannel-clad farmer from Greenville, Tennessee, who works for a nonprofit called Rural Resources. Through a series of workshops and training programs, the organization equips low-income, food-insecure teens in her area with the skills they need to take care of their nutritional needs, including many of the old-timey ones Daisy Luther teaches: growing their own fresh fruit and produce, canning, pickling, and making jams.
Our world headquarters is located just an hour east of Dallas, Texas. This plant manufactures shelters with sizes ranging from the affordable BombNado that goes in under new homes being constructed to the popular round culvert pipes which have been around for decades to the Billionaire class poured in place concrete hardened bunkers that cost into the millions.
MREs at the time were pretty much like they are now, but the menus have improved and some minor details have made this meal in a bag much more palatable if you can believe that. I served before they had things like M&M’s or skittles for dessert and hot sauce to flavor your food. We also didn’t have a built-in heater like they do now. If you wanted your MRE warm you were limited only by your creativity. MRE food packets are foil so they are both waterproof and allow you to heat them on almost anything. We would use the heater vents in our trucks, lay them on our stoves in the tent or on the block of our engines.
Adherents of the back-to-the-land movement inspired by Helen and Scott Nearing, sporadically popular in the United States in the 1930s and 1970s (exemplified by The Mother Earth News magazine), share many of the same interests in self-sufficiency and preparedness. Back-to-the-landers differ from most survivalists in that they have a greater interest in ecology and counterculture. Despite these differences, The Mother Earth News was widely read by survivalists as well as back-to-the-landers during that magazine's early years, and there was some overlap between the two movements.

One item you must have is jug or two of plain, unscented, regular bleach and an eye-dropper for precise measurement. Adding one part bleach to nine parts water makes a great disinfectant, but more importantly you can add 16 drops of bleach to a gallon of water to kill germs in an emergency. It has other obvious uses for hygiene, and is too cheap to not have handy for such an occasion. Just keep in mind that bleach has a short shelf life, not the first thing you’d want to stockpile. Get more than one water filter, such as the ones made by Sawyer or Berkey.

This is true, Kat. Babe, it doesn’t even need to be a true crisis… There are lots of times your stash will come in handy. Unexpected company. Your kid telling you the night before the bake sale that he needs 3 dozen brownies to take to school the next morning. You get out of work late and are too tired to make a grocery run. Everyone in the family gets the flu and you can’t get to the store. The list goes on but the point is that you should be rotating, using and enjoying your stash as part of normal living. A cookbook you might find useful is “The Prepper’s Cookbook” by Tess Pennington. Lots of ideas for setting up your base stash and great recipes too.
When it comes to food, it is also a good idea to become familiar with items that can help you store food, like a pressure canner in order to re-use your cans, a dehydrator so that any game or food you find or kill, can be preserved and dried for future use. It is also necessary to learn how to purify your own water. Bottled water is only the first step in case of emergencies. But if things don’t turn out well, then as a survival skill, it would be best to know how to purify water for yourself and your family.
You can find rice in any store in this world. It’s a cheap and healthy addition to your emergency survival foods stockpile. It will provide you with the carbohydrates that will fuel you through a disaster. Half a cup of dried rice makes 1 cup of cooked rice. When it comes to survival foods, rice will help you stretch your food supply without breaking the bank. Every time you go to the grocery store you should pick up a large bag of rice to add to your emergency food supply.
To ease your mind from the rising tension between nuclear-capable countries and worries of a civil unrest, investing a decent amount of money for this underground survival shelter may serve as one of your best life-saving decisions. At a price of $200,000, you get a Radius Engineering Survival Shelter with fiberglass shells that outlasts steel shells and concrete shells. Apart from the extremely tough walls, Radius also build their bunkers with air purifiers with a UV-radiation sterilization system too.
The remote island nation, clinging to the southern part of the globe 2,500 miles off Australia’s coast, has 4.8 million people and six times as many sheep. It has a reputation for natural beauty, easy networking, low-key politicians who bike to work, and rental prices half those of the San Francisco Bay Area. That makes it an increasingly popular destination not only for those fretting about impending dystopia, but for tech entrepreneurs seeking incubators for nurturing startups.
This is not an actual website but a YouTube video blog of sorts. This channel has many survival videos based around survival tactics and self defense. This video talks about people moving out of the city’s. I agree with his philosophy on this that people will not leave the city until necessary because they will be wain=ting for the government to bail them out. I also wrote an article about how people will react in a disaster situation.
If you just need to cover one person for two weeks in the cheapest way possible, you can buy one bucket for $130 and stretch the 27,330 total calories an extra day or two at 1,900 calories per day instead of the usual 2,275. Or buy two buckets for the cheapest way to cover two people. But we’d recommend a minimum of two buckets regardless, even for one person, just for redundancy and the unexpected.
Forgetting to store spices, salt, oil and basic condiments that are needed for your food storage. How will your famous spaghetti sauce taste without Italian seasoning, salt, olive oil and that pinch of sugar? Beans are a great staple to have on hand and can be seasoned in a variety of ways using salt, cumin, garlic powder, onion powder, soy sauce, ground red pepper and more.
This is the easiest way to store emergency water and is ideal for any type of home. As long as you have warning you won’t have or be able to use your water, the waterBOB is indispensable. This is a one-time-use container that holds up to 100 gallons of water. Since we need to store 1 gallon per person per day, the waterBOB provides 100 days’ worth of water for one person.
It is hard learning to garden. I just put in my first huge garden a couple of years ago. One thing that I did learn…. is that there are many different ways to garden. There are many books at the library about different types of gardening and of course the internet has a wealth of knowledge. Everyone of course, thinks that their way is the best. Good luck with the garden.
Using resinous woods (such as pine) for interior heating and cooking fires a very bad idea. As smoke cools on its way up a chimney, flammable resins accumulate in chimney flue(s). Eventually, months or years later. when someone builds another fire (say, during a cold Winter night), those resins ignite, and you have an upside-down solid-fuel rocket engine. Flame may gush sideways out of cracks in chimneys, igniting an entire abode.
We have a fourteen year old Yorky mix. Anyone comes around during the day she barks, we praise her. At night, however, she justs emits a low growl to wake everyone up. We are sailors out of Alaska. On this trip I am sure we would have been boarded at least twice in the last four years if not for Mollie. When we move ashore we will have another small, intelligent dog backed up by a War Dog , or two. I know one old boy that if he were to give the word, you be dead. My brother’s dogs will all begin barking on command. He has a good mix of dogs.
More countries trying to ditch the US dollar: After Venezuela, Germany, Austria and the Netherlands prudently repatriated a substantial portion (if not all) of their physical gold held at the NY Fed or other western central banks in recent years, this morning Turkey also announced that it has decided to repatriate all its gold stored in the US Federal Reserve and deliver it to the Istanbul Stock Exchange, according to reports in Turkey's Yeni Safak. It won't be the first time Turkey has asked the NY Fed to ship the country's gold back: in recent years, Turkey repatriated 220 tons of gold from abroad, of which 28.7 tons was brought back from the US last year.

…..and the Democratic Party who used slaves and still do. Imagine trying to pass your selves off as “progressive”? Perhaps a little bit of self aggrandizement here. Remember which party it was that was beating people for speaking out? I am old enough to remember that. The left endured no beatings at all. Democrats were of that party oppressed. Education is a wonderful thing if you open your mind to it. Your racist rant flows along with your apologist leanings. You are 100 percent correct in that almost all mass shooters are white males. BUT lets look at prison populations. Oh oh, no denying this either, non-whites are disproportionally represented. I have heard the excuses and they do not impress me at all. I have grown up through the “progressives” enslaving minorities with welfare. Hmmm.

We have a fourteen year old Yorky mix. Anyone comes around during the day she barks, we praise her. At night, however, she justs emits a low growl to wake everyone up. We are sailors out of Alaska. On this trip I am sure we would have been boarded at least twice in the last four years if not for Mollie. When we move ashore we will have another small, intelligent dog backed up by a War Dog , or two. I know one old boy that if he were to give the word, you be dead. My brother’s dogs will all begin barking on command. He has a good mix of dogs.

I think there are stages to prepping. The first stage is awareness. Maybe you experience a major hurricane and have to drive around town freaking out because you don’t have enough bottled water. You think, “Never again.” So you purchase realistic items for your area. The second stage is when you come to realize how much stuff you will actually need and you go out and purchase those items. The third stage is when you realize that no matter how much stuff you have stocked up, it will eventually run out in a grid down situation. That leads to the fourth stage–skills. Do you know how to garden when your life and the lives of your family depend on it? Do you know how to trap and hunt? Can you tell the difference between edible plants and poisonous plants? Do you have a trade like carpentry, plumbing, engineering, canning, bushcraft, herbal medicine? The sixth and final stage (and I am just making this up off the top of my head) is when you realize that no matter how many skills you have, you can’t make it alone. You begin to look for a community.

I connected with Jennifer through Daisy Luther, the Virginia-based writer and survival preparedness expert behind the blog The Organic Prepper, which boasts more than 30,000 followers on Facebook and roughly 32,000 monthly visits on Pinterest. Jennifer says she learned a lot about prepping from the site and is a member of its affiliated private Facebook group, which Luther says is nearly 77 percent women. (Luther and other bloggers I spoke with for this story say that while they approach survivalism from a female perspective, they’ve encountered no small number of men who are interested in these practices as well.)
One of the biggest issues with GMO food is the allergy cross-over. Because genes from nuts, fish, soy and other highly allergenic plants/animals are used in the to give the need seed the desired characteristics, they can trigger serious allergic reactions in people who had no way of knowing the food was dangerous or even which food it was that caused it! If that wasn't bad enough already, it will certainly only be worse in a grid-down situation where medical care is limited at best.
Freeze-dried survival meals and dishes are another space-saving, convenient option, but require a significant amount of water to prepare and can be expensive. MREs are quite popular, extremely calorie dense, come in bomb-proof packaging and have a host of nice pack-ins like sauces, spices and candy, but are expensive, bulky and a steady diet of them will cause serious constipation. Don’t rule out either; just make sure you have good reasons for choosing them.
Trauma Kit- Items to treat serious trauma and injuries. Nasal airways, occlusive dressings, decompression needles, IV lines and solution, splints, suture kit etc. You must have appropriate skills to utilize these items without causing more harm. If you lack those skills, there is a chance that someone in your group or a good Samaritan might, and having these things on hand may make the difference between life and death.

These are all great tips and many I have just practiced as a way of life. Living in rural areas with horses (we don’t refer to horses as livestock lol), l we always have to be prepared to stay where we are sometimes for a month. When that happens it is an experience if the power is out but we get by just fine. Power is always turned on in the cities first with natural disasters. Water is always the biggest concern to have a fresh supply for our horses.

Stockpiling food has another advantage that you didn’t mention. You will be buying tomorrows food at today’s prices. Food prices are not going to go down. Also by stockpiling food it allows you to buy when you want to ( on sale ) not when you need to. Many things can happen that a food storage could be put to an advantage. Job loss, Hours cut,medical or car repair bill not expected or planed for. All of these things could be used as a reason to stockpile food.
11/4/18 Grid protectionEnable IntenseDebate Comments: Enable IntenseDebate CommentsIt’s not often geology and national security wind up in the same sentence. Most people don’t think about electrical power in connection to either the ground under their feet or solar flares overhead, but Dr. Adam Schultz of Oregon State University, and EarthScopeMagnetotelluric Program Lead Scientist, says that connection presents a clear and present risk that power utilities need to consider. read mor […]
“It was never offered as a contrary movement to hippies by any means,” Mitchell explains. “I think maybe it was just one more expression of ‘You can try something new now.’” Survivalism was and still is, Mitchell believes, a product of late capitalist consumer society, premised on drumming up panic about various hypothetical catastrophes and furnishing people with products that will allegedly help survive them.
Perhaps the most unusual thing about the female prepper lifestyle is that it suggests a counterintuitive movement through time: a return to a slower, more elemental way of life, one that eschews the conveniences of modern consumer society in favor of the empowerment that comes from doing things yourself. Some of the women I spoke to said being a prepper helped them carry on the same old-fashioned life skills — like gardening, canning, and smart budgeting — that helped their mothers and grandmothers during the Great Depression. Others harkened back to the homesteaders of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, whose pioneering settlement and cultivation of the Great Plains form the backbone of the American myth of self-reliance.
11/4/18 Search & rescueEnable IntenseDebate Comments: Enable IntenseDebate CommentsFinding lost hikers in forests can be a difficult and lengthy process, as helicopters and drones can’t get a glimpse through the thick tree canopy. Recently, it’s been proposed that autonomous drones, which can bob and weave through trees, could aid these searches. But the GPS signals used to guide the aircraft can be unreliable or nonexistent in forest environments. read mor […]

I know that in my own case and also with the majority of the readers on Backdoor Survival, hunkering down and bugging in will always be preferred to taking off into the unknown with our stuff. For many, the choice to bug in has to do with family, health concerns or financial considerations. That, plus the availability of stored supplies makes bugging in – or staying at home – the choice when a disaster strikes.

8. Basic camping gear. In the case of an evacuation, take this with you in case hotels are already filled. Additionally, camping skills double as survival skills. Learning how to locate the best camping spot, how to pitch a tent, how to cook over a fire, and how to enjoy nature are important for every member of the family to learn. A good quality tent, sleeping bags, sleeping pads (for us older folks!), and a campstove are good basics to begin with.

8. Oats – Another staple, that is super cheap & easy 30 year storage option. Oats are perfect for the prepper because they only require boiled water to prepare, then just add some cinnamon or sugar and you have breakfast. It also helps to control blood sugar and cholesterol. Oats can also double as feed for most animals. Here are 10 reasons you should store oats.

Perhaps the most unusual thing about the female prepper lifestyle is that it suggests a counterintuitive movement through time: a return to a slower, more elemental way of life, one that eschews the conveniences of modern consumer society in favor of the empowerment that comes from doing things yourself. Some of the women I spoke to said being a prepper helped them carry on the same old-fashioned life skills — like gardening, canning, and smart budgeting — that helped their mothers and grandmothers during the Great Depression. Others harkened back to the homesteaders of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, whose pioneering settlement and cultivation of the Great Plains form the backbone of the American myth of self-reliance.

More than 500 bunkers for lease are owned by a ranching company that grazes cattle on the land around them in Edgemont, S.D. Robert Vicino's company, The Vivos Group, is trying to lease 575 former military munitions bunkers in southwest South Dakota to doomsday preppers, for use in case of an asteroid strike, a nuclear war or any other catastrophic event. Ryan Hermens, Rapid City Journal

Testers felt Soylent beat Tsogo on flavor. However, the Tsogo line has a lot of products, such as fruit and vegetable powders and boost packs (protein, caffeine, energy, green tea), so it’s worth checking out. This might be a line of products you want to work into your regular life, so cycling through your supply before it expires would make the shelf-life less of a concern.
For example, have you considered the need for feminine products? What about canes, walkers, and manually operated wheelchairs? Pets need food, crates, and toys to keep them occupied while the rest of family members are recovering from chaos. It will be impossible to cover every contingency but be aware of what those needs are now then prioritize those that you deem most important.

Always store your bulk foods in food storage containers. I have seen literally tons and tons of food thrown away because they were left in sacks, where they became highly susceptible to moisture, insects and rodents. If you are using plastic buckets make sure they are lined with a food grade plastic liner available from companies that carry packaging supplies. Never use trash can liners as these are treated with pesticides. Don’t stack them too high. In an earthquake they may topple, the lids pop open, or they may crack. A better container is the #10 tin can which most preparedness companies use when they package their foods.

Here are some basics are things that can be essential to a successful shelter: wood matches, lots of rechargeable batteries for flashlights, battery charger, candles, siphon pump, head lamps, lanterns, lantern oil, generator and generator fuel, a solar panel as a backup source, large gas cans (like 14 gallon), zip ties, chainsaw, shovel, rope, rake, steel pots and kettles for boiling water, large car batteries, and hand saws.
If you are close to ground zero, the buildings are going down, and I live near mountains so the shock wave would hit twice or more off the mountains. Without shelter, you’ve no protection from secondary fall out, as you’d need to make the shelter air tight. That’s where the plastic comes in. If the building stands, you’d spend that half an hour, shutting off the AC and heat as you don’t want to bring in outside contaminated air. You’d tape off doors, vents etc. You’d need to live in that space, it could be weeks.

The Silo Home in Saranac, New York up in Adirondack Mountains makes another incredible underground shelter that will keep you alive when a nuclear bomb hits the big city. The property costs around $750,000 listed on the Saranac real estate. At the site, you will see a regular, cabin-like home serving as a decoy house. However, the real home lies underneath the closet.

A thought on food. We are moving to our long term chunk of land soon. Bunker or similar is long term plan down the road. Meantime as part of us being more self sufficient we have been exploring and getting into Aquaponics. This would require electricity and the right lighting for interior food growth. it would also be something you would want setup before hand. That said, this is a great way to produce long term self sustaining food sources. i would certainly still include the norms for support and back up food. My initial thought process is hiding my entrance within a small aquaponics greenhouse. This allows me to do it within my bunker without suspicion from daily entry. There are also a number of new technological ways to automate and monitor you systems remotely.

Next, look at ways to become more self-sufficient in water. If you already have a well you’re sorted. Otherwise consider a rainwater catchment system. If you have a stream or river nearby you could build a large water filter and run a pipe to it from the stream, giving you a constant filtered supply. Be adaptable, but find something – without water, your refuge is unsustainable.

I don’t encounter any preppers at the school that day, but I do meet women from all over the United States and with all kinds of reasons for wanting to learn how to cut and drill wood, including a young yoga studio employee from Wisconsin who is building some custom shelving for her kitchen appliances and cookbooks, as well as two seniors from Washington, DC, who want to build a set of matching cabinets to house their prized collection of vintage wine glasses. Down by the garden, I meet a pair of women from Missouri who are hoping to go into business flipping houses. “We’re tired of waiting for our husbands to do it,” one of them says.

No flour/wheat because you need yeast, etc? Not completely true. If you have access to clean water (or milk/yoghurt), you can make Indian flat bread or chapattis! Once you get the hang of making them – basically adding tepid water to the flour until you can make a smooth and elastic dough, then roll it out and cook in a skillet – you can make endless variations! I often dissolve a vegetable or beef bouillon cube (you should stock those too, or instant bouillon) in the water first to add more flavor to the chapattis, but you can use any herbs you like. Getting the hang of making them might seem a little trying at first, but eventually whipping them up is just a breeze! My kids love eating them right out of the pan with a little butter spread on the still hot bread, and we often eat them together with beans, etc. Here’s a handy tutorial for those interested: //indianfood.about.com/od/breadrecipes/ig/How-to-Make-Chapatis/Making-Chapatis—Step-1.htm
Obama says he will decide on a strategy for the Syria situation TODAY (Friday, 14 October) but let's not kid ourselves, this was decided WEEKS AGO. That's how long it takes to move the kinds of assets that are now deployed in Diego Garcia. So the writing is on the wall and the forces are deployed: It appears we are going to directly attack the government of Syria and when we do, Russia will defend its Syrian ally. There will be the war - and WE will have started it, without any cause or national security interest.

If you sign up for alerts about CMEs, I suggest you narrow the frequency of the alerts to no more than once a day. You can do this right when you create the alert, under the “show option” link. That way, if some new study is published about CMEs and every science news outlet covers it, you don’t get hundreds of alerts, just one per day. You might even change the alert, while the news covers this study, to once a week.

While media coverage has often focused on a certain gun-toting, masculine segment of the subculture, both women described being drawn to prepping as a form of female self-empowerment. As Bedford sees it, finding yourself unprepared in the midst of a crisis can be a “terrible feeling of weakness” for a mother. “It makes sense to be empowered and trained and have the right supplies—and in this case, to have extra food on hand—because as a mom in particular, your family just relies on you,” she said.